This post contains spoilers through the February 5 episode of House of Lies.

At the end of last night’s episode of House of Lies, Jeannie may just have been talking about Marty when she told him “I might possibly be the only person on the planet who has known you longer than five minutes and actually likes you. And all you do is shit on me. So fuck you.” But to a certain extent, she could have been talking about the show’s attitude towards women. Like Marty, House of Lies may not be aware that what it’s doing to its female characters is bad. But it is, to the point that I’m considering walking away from what I once saw as a promising show.

First, let’s talk about Marty’s “Medusa black-hole ex.” From day one, it’s been a huge problem for the show that Monica is supposed to be both a pill-popping, irresponsible sex maniac who also happens to be completely fantastic at her job and together when it comes to her professional life. There’s a bridge to be drawn here about how the skills that you need to be an excellent management consultant could make you a toxic person in personal relationships. But there’s a difference between treating people instrumentally and getting yourself so blotto you can’t be roused, a state that doesn’t tend to discriminate between days when you have to be at work early and days you don’t. And the show has never really explained that fundamental contradiction, or explained who Monica is as a person at all (much less what drew Marty to her in the first place).

She’s nothing but a vile shrew, telling Jeremiah that he hates her not because, as he puts it “you’re toying with my son, you ignore yours, and you are the perfect poster girl for narcissism, but “because you want to fuck me.” She shows up to care for Roscoe not because she actually cares but because her married lover reneged on a promise to take her to Fiji. And are we supposed to believe for a minute that Jeremiah would leave Roscoe with her when push came to shove given what comes next doesn’t seem totally out of left field? “I arranged an internship for his fat as fuck daughter. I even let him…do you know what a golden shower is?” Monica rants, before dragging Roscoe along with her to burgal her lover’s house for what she thinks she’s owed: “We are talking about roughly $16,000, and that is a conservative monetization.” They bond briefly over how great she looks in a couture dress (I do wish the show hadn’t fallen back on the gay/gender-questioning kid=fashion maven trope), and then Monica decides to steal a painting. “It’s kind of creepy,” Roscoe tells her of the Egon Schiele. And of course it’s all about Monica, again: “There’s still some beauty in there, isn’t there?” she needs to know. Ultimately, Roscoe gets himself to school and out of her way, but it’s frightening to think what a less-resourceful kid might have been dragged into.

All of this is not to say that female characters can’t be loathesome. But if we’re supposed to believe that she and Marty are deeply entangled, and by something other than just sex, that she’s very good at her job, there has to be something else going on here, and we need to be made to see and understand it. We got at least some of that last week, with Jeannie’s on-the-road affair, though again, it would have been nice if we knew more about her engagement before we saw her reacting badly to it. And I barely even want to get into Clyde and his corn-eating Mormon, a nakedly gross-out tactic that continues to confine Clyde to a distasteful combination of infantile and frat boy.

The one thing I thought worked well about this episode was the way it handled race and ethnicity. As soon as it became clear, as Marty put it that “Brant Butterfield: racist? He’s not going to want to hear a word out of my mouth except for the best way to shine a shoe or the optimal way to load luggage into a Pullman car,” the show could have done something corny about race and reconciliation. Instead, Marty went into killer mode, taking advantage of the situation to set up a test for Jeannie while getting himself out of responsibility for a situation that was doomed to awkwardness. And he first bonded with the secretly-Jewish CFO, then warning him in Jeannie’s presentation that he’d be only too happy to sell him out, saying “You should check and make sure that number is…kosher.” Sometimes, it’s satisfying to see bigots learn. And sometimes, it’s satisfying to see Marty say “I’m sorry for interrupting, Mr. Butterfield. Sometimes I just don’t know my place,” all while putting Butterfield in his.

This post contains spoilers for the January 22 episode of House of Lies.

To me, this episode exemplified what are becoming the clear best and worst of House of Lies. There’s the absolute ridiculousness of Marty and Jeannie’s visit to the Winters’ house, which is really just an excuse for the writers to stick phrases like “micro-phallus” and “that black dick” into the script. But there’s also the return of Greg Norbert, who is clearly going to be this season’s super-villain, setting up an arc that will explore how much you can focus purely on profit and selfishness and still stay in business. And as always, Marty’s home life continues to be wonderful.

Starting with that, I appreciate how the show juxtaposes Roscoe’s naturalness with Marty’s attempt to feign it. “What do you do if you like a girl, and you like a boy?” Roscoe asks his father, shortly after Marty awakens from a bad dream of his mother on the anniversary of her suicide. “I don’t know, Roscoe,” Marty stumbles, only to have his son blithely tell him, “I’m open to whatever.” That challenge between appreciating Roscoe’s openness to the world and protecting him from the people who will be resistant to it or fail to understand it is clearly an enormous one for Marty. But it’s also obvious that when Marty lets himself see the world as Roscoe does, say, in the moment when he relaxes and tells his son, “Yeah, man. Teach me how to Dougie,” that he can experience joy he can’t feel anywhere else. So much of Marty’s life is artifice that his home feels like more of an oasis than usual.

All of which makes it tense when it’s breached. Clearly, his life was going to be upended when Greg Norbert strolls into Galweather Stern to announce that after Marty’s team left, “We felt sad. No, not really. We had all this bailout money.” It turns out, he’s going to have MetroCapital buy Galweather Stern so they can have their own in-house consulting firm. “You will be ours,” he says cheerfully before warning Marty “I’m going to smash your head in. Then I’m going to personally fuck your bashed-in eye socket. Metaphorically.” Marty’s only response is to hit below the belt, and not metaphorically, asking, “how’s your beautiful wife? I heard she tastes like Pinkberry.” But as with much of Marty’s maneuvering, it’s a move that doesn’t account for the long game. Skip shows up at his house at the end of the episode to warn Marty that Greg’s animosity for him isn’t a joke, and to explain that he has no particular intention of sticking his neck out for a man who’s never bothered to forge a personal relationship with him and who leaves huge amounts of emotional damage in his wake. “Why the fuck would I do that?” he wants to know when Marty assumes Skip will protect him. “It’s a relationship business…Other people do what you do without leaving a swath of destruction behind them…I am the one left behind spending half my time making nice with people whose lives you’ve carved up and gutted.”

It’s enough to get Marty scared, but not enough to get him to stop. Just as he let Janelle see his blackness instead of him in Indiana, Marty does the same thing after going out with Clyde (clearly the devil sitting on Marty’s shoulder). When a rich club patron assumes Marty’s the valet, Marty lets him, only to drive off at breakneck speed in the man’s very nice car. It’s a wildly self-destructive move, and an unnerving one. The line between an aggressive playboy and businessman and a person who’s totally out of control appears to be all too fine.

This post contains spoilers through the January 15 episode of House of Lies.

While I don’t always think it hits its marks, one of the things I find intriguing about House of Lies is the way each case illustrates a different idea about people with extremely large amounts of money. I don’t think this week’s case, clearly based on the incredibly nasty divorce between Frank McCourt and his wife that’s put the fate of the Dodgers in doubt. In this case, it’s the idea that people will do almost anything, even fake their way through an irretrievably broken marriage, to hold on to vast amounts of money. But I also think this case, unlike the last one, revealed one of the central problems of the show as a half-hour comedy: in that amount of time, it’s almost impossible to spend time both developing the backstory of the main characters and really digging into the motivations of their clients.

That was particularly clear since we got our first glimpse of one of Marty’s colleagues’ inner lives tonight (and no, Doug having some Cat Deeley-related airport ejaculation problems doesn’t count as an inner life). I adore Kristen Bell and want only good things for her, and I thought this was nice, if a little slight. Looked up by an old acquaintance, Jeannie decides they’re going on a date. I thought this episode did a nice job of capturing the uncertainty of this kind of scenario, whether it’s Jeannie just not being sure what she’s walking into, or her seeing the earring and the hair flipping and deciding that she’s going to try to be interested anyway. When it turns out he’s paying her a very different kind of compliment, Bell sold the disappointment—sometimes you don’t always want to be loved for your mind. And in her sad report back, where she explains “He was a fucking headhunter,” Clyde’s “That’s funny, because I’m constantly looking for head, also,” encapsulated the ways in which he’s a jerk and the team may not be a great environment for Jeannie.

Speaking of sex, that opening scene between Marty and his wife was convincingly uncomfortable, but I’m not entirely sure to what end. If we’re going to see a lot of them having sex or waking up in the morning afterwards, I’d be interested to hear more about what binds them together, even though Monica is competing with him for work and is pretty awful to Roscoe, who appears to be the emotional center of Marty’s life. That’s much more interesting, or rather, primary question than whether divorced couples have the same rules about consent during sex. And it’s probably one we need answered before we can intuit what it means to Marty to get choked during sex.

The one area where we have clarity, and that not coincidentally works better than anything else in the show, is Walter’s relationship with Roscoe. Early in the episode, we see him run down Roscoe’s Principal Gita, who says things like “A group of the class parent body wanted to put a stop to Roscoe’s unrestrained and joyous disregard for the gender-specific, crossdressing,” and “I wonder if in the future we could speak in less militaristic terms.” But when he’s confronted with Roscoe’s pain directly, he can’t bully anyone, he can’t be belligerent. As they’re playing video games, Roscoe asks him “Hey dad, what’s a fudgepacker?” You can see Marty absorbing the hurt his son doesn’t even know he should be feeling—and Roscoe retreating into silence when he recognizes that he should be hurt. “Did somebody really call you that?” Marty asks. Roscoe’s silence is more eloquent than any of the adults’ dirty talk.

This post contains spoilers through the pilot of House of Lies.

So, this show. As I wrote in my review of this show, I think it basically think this show has a “When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid” problem compounded by the fact that it doesn’t seem totally clear to the folks running it (though I will ask them later this week) what the strongest parts of House of Lies are. And so we have the gamut tonight of the awesomeness of the team’s evil pitch to MetroCapital, and the awfulness of That Scene in the restaurant.

The good stuff first. I think House of Lies will end up being a really fascinating test of how far our tolerance for anti-heroes can go. It’s one thing to get emotionally invested in Tony Soprano or Walter White, because even though their acts are heinous, there’s an almost-zero chance that we’ll ever come into contact with anyone like them. There is a vastly less-than-zero chance that we know people who have been deeply affected by the economic downturn. And depending on where you went to school, there’s also a chance that you know a whole bunch of management consultants. So are we willing to tolerate realistic awful acts in our entertainment? Will we be entertained by Marty and company, and do very little about their real-life counterparts? Will we turn away from both in disgust? Or will House of Lies drive more of us to the 99 percent movement? The MetroCapital stuff is so blunt, and so believable, and it’s a reminder to interrogate the motivations of corporate do-gooderism.

I also really like Marty’s home life. There’s something kind of powerful at a time when the networks can’t put out a show centered on a black family, and when we’re awash in ridiculous conversations about the pathology of black men, to see a program that takes for granted the idea that a white audience will tune in to watch a three-man black family do its thing. Glynn Turman can pretty much do no wrong, as far as I’m concerned, and I enjoy watching him go from Mayor Royce to a retired-therapist semi-hippie. And I think Donis Leonard Jr. is doing a nice job as Roscoe, a role that could be super-cliche but that feels human because of his relative blitheness. I also really appreciate the fact that the show is telling a story about a child that doesn’t have a parent be pure evil or saintly. Parents of gay or trans kids aren’t perfect. They make compromises. They make mistakes. Capturing that and encouraging people to keep working at it, rather than castigating themselves for or shutting down over making mistakes, is an important cultural message.
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I’ll be recapping House of Lies, but I also reviewed the show for The Atlantic. And if you’re considering whether or not to tune in to the Sunday premiere, this should convince you:

House of Lies is at its best when it focuses specifically on the grotesqueness and desperation of the one percent, a subject that management consulting is uniquely poised to explore. “These guys are just looking for a way to justify their bonuses,” one of Doug’s junior team members tells him as they walk through the airport on the way to their first assignment. “And why shouldn’t they?” Marty wants to know. “Because they robbed the American public of billions of dollars by selling them bad mortgages,” his coworker Jeannie (a charming but underused Kristen Bell) tells him. And true to form, Greg Norbert, an executive at fictional mortgage giant MetroCapital, complains that people are unjustly angry at the company for giving them what they wanted in a boom, suggesting that underwater homeowners “cowboy the fuck up.”…

After the assignment at MetroCapital, Greg Norbert appears again, this time to set into motion the season’s major plot arc: MetroCapital’s attempt to acquire the firm Marty and his team work for so the mortgage company can have in-house consultants rather than hiring outsiders. “After you left, we felt sad,” Greg tells Marty, who had hoped not to see Greg again after a sublimely awkward business dinner. “No, not really. But we had all this bailout money.” That last line sums up one of the most off-putting things about the economic crisis and recovery we’ve been living through since 2008: The people substantially responsible for our current peril ended up with a lot of money and remain unrepentant.

For those of you who were curious about how the show would handle Cheadle’s character’s gender-variant son, the answer is also very well, in a way that gets beyond the supportive-parent/unsupportive parent dichotomy to examine the actual hurts and compromises parents of gay and non-gender conforming parents make every day. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the show knows that these are the things it has going for it best. There’s a lot of semi-standard cable debauchery, something I’m getting increasingly sick of: risque sex talk is not inherently meaningful. And not all the clients are equally interesting or offer equal opportunity for commentary on the economy. But Cheadle is very good. Kristen Bell is very good. And I’m kind of glad to see management consulting go under the microscope.